The Department of the Interior is currently conducting a review of the charters and charges of Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) Advisory Commissions in an effort to maximize feedback from these boards and to ensure their compliance with both FACA and the President’s recent executive orders. The review process is meant to identify committees that merit improvement in order to fully support their mission, serve the local communities, and ensure the Department was getting local feedback to the maximum extent possible. This is a standard review process which previous administrations have also conducted during the transition process. The goal is to institutionalize state and local input and ongoing collaboration, particularly in communities surrounding public lands. This review process necessitates the temporary postponement of advisory committee meetings. Therefore, meetings by these groups are postponed for the present time.

***

------------------------------------------------------------------

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted on November 16, 1990, to address the rights of lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations to Native American cultural items, including human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. The Act assigned implementation responsibilities to the Secretary of the Interior. Staff support is provided by the National NAGPRA Program, including:

Publishing notices for museums and Federal agencies in the Federal Register,

The National Park Service has compliance obligations for parks, separate from the National NAGPRA Program. National NAGPRA is the omnibus program, the constituent groups of which are all Federal agencies, museums that receive Federal funds, tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations and the public.